Michael Kennedy: a critic who opened our ears to music

No statue has ever been put up to honour a critic, said Sibelius, and perhaps no statue ever will be. But Michael Kennedy, who died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 88, was never the sort of man who needed that kind of recognition. His life – tragic in many parts, yet ultimately triumphant – was a noble monument of its own.

Many critics leave behind readers who remember their work fondly. But few have changed our perceptions of great creative personalities in the way Michael did: today, we hear Elgar’s music with his ears, so to speak, And even fewer were loved as widely and deeply as this journalist-scholar, whose innings ended this week, 73 years after he had begun his working life as a teenage assistant in this paper’s Manchester office.

The biographical facts can be set out plainly. Born in Manchester in 1926, Michael never saw his father again after he was 12: “We assumed he went off to join the Army.” In later life, he found out that his father had settled down with another family. “There was no point moping when he left. We just got on with it. That’s what you did.”

Having lied about his age to join the Telegraph, he then served with the Royal Navy in the Pacific, and witnessed the rubble of Hiroshima. Upon returning to Manchester, he married Eslyn, who was diagnosed almost immediately with MS, and he nursed her for 50 years (26 of them as this paper’s Northern Editor) until her death in 1999; whereupon he married Joyce Bourne, a GP who shared his love of music.

Cursed by the kind of ill fortune that might have come from the imagination of Thomas Hardy, a writer he loved, Michael found his liberation in music. Inspired by a teacher at his prep school in Sussex, who introduced him to recordings of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, the curious boy became a critic who did more to advance the cause of English music and English musicians than any other.

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In more than 60 years of writing about music, for this paper and for The Sunday Telegraph, he made countless friends all over the world and not a single adversary. Wherever he went, people willingly opened doors – or he opened doors for them. When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra visited Manchester some years ago, Daniel Barenboim, an old friend who had become the CSO’s music director, took himself off for breakfast at Michael’s.

His greatest friendships, with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir John Barbirolli, have become celebrated. It isn’t often that a critic is welcomed into the personal worlds of a great composer and a great conductor, yet VW and JB, as Michael called them, loved him as he loved them. Vaughan Williams stipulated that Kennedy should write his musical biography; when Barbirolli died in 1970, his family asked him to perform the same service.

The most self-effacing of men, Michael never wrote for effect, though in private he could be waspish. He was aware of the many follies of our world – what fun he would have had with the New Year’s Honours list! – but there was no malice in him. Only once did I hear him speak of another with bitterness; anyone who has read his obituary in this paper will recognise who that person was.

A Manchester man, who was proud of the city without ever lapsing into parochial piety, he travelled the world to hear music. He loved going to Salzburg, and relished Wexford in the autumn, but above all he loved summer nights at Glyndebourne, where the festival’s Christie family made him so welcome.

For years, August meant Edinburgh. We spent a wonderful evening 15 years ago, after a performance of Das Rheingold at the Festival Theatre, with Bob Willis, the former England cricket captain. For Michael to talk about cricket, which he loved almost as much as music, with one of the game’s finest bowlers, who knows his Wagner, was something he never forgot. Neither did Bob. “What a gentleman he was,” he said yesterday.

Michael’s greatest achievement, surely, was his Portrait of Elgar, published in 1968. “I could never understand how people could not hear the unhappiness that was always there for me in his music,” he said. “I never read about that Elgar, so I thought I’d better write a book myself.”

In recent years, to his great joy, the orchestra he loved so much was returned to him. In 1996 the Hallé moved from the famous yet decrepit Free Trade Hall to the Bridgewater Hall round the corner, and four years later Mark Elder, now Sir Mark, was appointed music director. “I saw at first hand what a great job JB did with the Hallé when he came back from New York during the war,” said Michael. “But Mark has done just as well in his way. I’ve lived through two golden ages with the Hallé, and I feel blessed.”

He heard them for the last time in November, at a concert conducted by Elder. He was frail, effectively lame, but music always restored his spirits. A programme of Butterworth, Bax and (of course) Elgar was capped by a marvellous performance of Sibelius’s fifth symphony. “What a work!” he said as he was helped to his feet afterwards. And with that simple expression of gratitude, a lifetime’s dedication to music reached its end.

I cannot pretend to be a disinterested witness. Beyond my family, and a handful of teachers, Michael touched my life more thoroughly than any person I have known. I loved him – but so did many others. They will feel no less hollow for his passing.

Michael was the gentlest of men, and the most sympathetic of critics: “Everybody has an off day,” he once said. “They don’t need me to tell them something they know better than anybody”. We have lost a great man, and music has lost an incomparable friend. A triumphant life indeed.

Yet again, a great Scouser is snubbed

A sad start to the year in Liverpool, with startling news about a local man whose talent has had crowds cheering since he first pulled on his boots. Yes, Ken Dodd was overlooked, yet again, for the knighthood that should have long been in the bag.

Rather less surprising was the announcement that Steven Gerrard would be leaving Anfield this summer. Gerrard has been a great servant for a great club, but in a game based on possession of the ball, nobody who gives it away so often can be called truly great. He was one of the “very goods”, which is still a very good thing to be.

As for Dodd, who is now in the last days of a career without equal in British variety, there is nothing to say that hasn’t been said countless times before. While Gerrard’s retirement from English football is regrettable, the long-standing snub to Doddy, the king of comedy, is a national scandal.

Bassey’s Beatles beats Cocker’s every time

Fraser Nelson, the Spectator editor and Telegraph columnist, really put a C among the Ps, as Wodehouse might have said,when he wrotethat the late Joe Cocker’s cover of With a Little Help From My Friends was the only time a singer had improved a Beatles song.

Hmm. Cocker’s emotional bleating and yelping never sounded convincing to these ears. But Shirley Bassey’s Something really works, with the Welsh belter throwing some paprika into the pot and giving it a good stir.

Billy J Kramer’s From a Window and It’s Only Love, by Gary “US” Bonds, are other examples. But the best may well be Tomorrow Never Knows, performed by 801 Live, a pick-up band led by Brian Eno: Lennon’s hippy-dippy song is transformed by Phil Manzanera’s guitar and Eno’s fruity Home Counties enunciation. Think again, “Groover” Nelson!